Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (13 page)

Shells work well as a form of money for various reasons: they are difficult to fake convincingly; many of them (cowries in particular) are of a consistent size and weight; they are tough and durable; and they feel nice in your hand and are easy to handle. The deep symbolism of shells, and their association with power and status, may also have encouraged their use for important transactions such as marriage dowries.

The trade in shells between the Indian Ocean and West Africa continued on a small scale for several centuries.
It wasn’t until European traders came on the scene that a radical shift took place and a whole new commodity emerged that could be purchased with shells, one that would change the course of human history.

Portuguese merchants were the first to figure out the connection between seashells from the Maldives and the markets of West Africa. For a while, they had the trade by sea to themselves but the British and the Dutch soon joined them, and eventually took over. Between 1600 and 1850, the East India Companies of these two great trading powers dominated global shell commerce.

Fleets of ships, known as East Indiamen, sailed first to India, Indonesia and China, where they loaded up with fine goods that were in great demand back in Europe: silks, spices and tea. Before departing again for home, the crews would stop at Indian and Sri Lankan ports to fill their holds with millions of Maldivian cowries. At this point of the trade, the shells were cheap and their main purpose was to act as ballast to keep the ships stable in rough seas throughout their voyages across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the west coast of Africa and back to Europe.

The shells were unloaded into auction houses in Amsterdam and London, where another circle of traders were waiting. They snapped up the shells, repacked them into a second fleet of ships and sailed them back down south.

Some two years after they had been plucked from the Indian Ocean, millions of cowries ended their longest ever journey. In the final stage of a 15,000-mile trip, the shells were lowered over the side of European ships and into small canoes that paddled up the shallow, mangrove-fringed creeks of West Africa. The shells were to be exchanged, not for goods to ship back to Europe, but for human slaves.

European slave traders had discovered that shells were the ideal currency to take to Africa and trade with kings and merchants (ammunition, weapons and other factory-made goods were also exchanged for human lives). Traders turned
a handsome profit, importing dirt-cheap shells and exchanging them for slaves.

Prices per human head rose over the years. In the 1680s, a slave cost around 10,000 shells; by the 1770s the price tag hanging around the neck of an adult male slave was more than 150,000 cowries. Once the shells had changed hands, the slaves were shipped across the Atlantic, many of them to work in Caribbean plantations. And so it was that cups of English tea, made from tea leaves packed among Maldivian cowries, were sweetened with sugar grown by the men and women whose lives had been bought with the very same shells.

At the peak of the slave trade, British fleets were importing an average of 40 million cowries into West Africa every year. Throughout the eighteenth century, as
Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson
discuss in detail in their book
The Shell Money of the Slave Trade
, 10 billion shells were shipped across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

From the point of view of the molluscs that made all those shells, this is a hugely impressive feat. Enduring such intense exploitation without dwindling is testament to their reproductive prowess and it comes as rather a surprise given that female cowries must spend much of their time brooding eggs, instead of casting their young straight into the big blue, as many of their relatives do. In general, the longer an animal spends tending its offspring, and the fewer young it produces in one go, the more vulnerable the population is to overexploitation by humans.

When the trade in Maldivian cowries collapsed, it was not because supplies of shells had run out. In 1807, the British government passed an Act of Parliament making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire, and although trafficking persisted for a time among some colonies, the trade in shell money to West Africa drew
quickly to a halt. Humans would never again be swapped for shells on the international market, although for a time slaves were still sold within Africa for shells. But this wasn’t the end of the story for the European trade in shell money. A decade later, another new commodity emerged in West Africa, which once again was shipped to Europe in return for shells. Europeans turned their attention from exploiting fellow human beings to exploiting the natural world, and they did so on an even more staggering scale.

It’s perhaps strange to think that the global trade in palm oil that is currently responsible for the bulldozing of natural habitats across the tropics has its origins in the nineteenth century. Palm oil lubricated the gears and greased the wheels of the industrial revolution that set the modern world in motion. Factories and homes were lit with palm oil lamps, and workers used palm oil soap to wash off the factory grime.

Back then, most of the world’s palm oil was grown in West African plantations, and British traders continued to use Maldivian cowries to buy it. Rather than fading away, the shell trade ramped up a gear, more than doubling previous levels. By 1850, more than 100 million shells were being traded each year. But there was one more crisis ahead for the European shell trade, one from which it would never recover.

In 1845 a German trader, Adolph Jacob Hertz, sailed west across the Indian Ocean after unsuccessfully trying to buy cowries directly from the King of the Maldives. The Maldivian monarchs had always been hostile towards any European merchants who showed up at their islands and Hertz was no exception. On his way back home, he called in to Zanzibar, an island off Africa’s east coast, where he discovered an all-too-obvious truth: cowries live all over the place.

On Zanzibar’s fine white beaches, Hertz found the Gold Ringer Cowrie. This species is similar to the Money Cowrie,
although slightly larger and with a more prominent golden circle on its back. Many traders had known of gold ringers and considered using them, but so far this alternative hadn’t made a dent in the Maldivian cowrie trade, largely because African merchants refused to accept them. However, the time was right for Hertz, and his discovery went on to revolutionise the cowrie trade. He set sail from Zanzibar, taking with him a few gold ringers and a good idea of where to find plenty more.

Before long, a trickle of gold ringers began to enter markets in West Africa. Exactly why merchants finally agreed to take these alternatives remains unclear. It could have been the impact of the booming palm oil industry that was pushing up prices of Money Cowries so that traders welcomed a cheaper option. These new shells went into circulation alongside the traditional Money Cowries, and the trade from East Africa soared.

This time around it was private dealers who dominated the shell trade, rather than national companies. German and French fleets transported gold ringers directly from East to West Africa and in less than 20 years imported 16 billion cowries, almost as many as the British and Dutch had throughout the previous century.

Gold ringers flooded into West Africa with a swift and inevitable consequence. Hyperinflation gripped the trade, and the value of shell money plummeted. Soon a handful of cowries was all but worthless. The Maldivian harvest of Money Cowries had already slumped and, 600 years after the shell trade began, it finally came to an end.

By the opening decade of the twentieth century, imported cowries had changed hands as currency for the final time. In total, more than 30 billion Maldivian cowrie shells ended up half a world away from where they were hatched and lived. The nature of shell money means they could not be withdrawn from circulation or replaced. Some shells were crushed for limestone and many were built into walls and
floors, as reminders of former wealth. And some people buried hoards of cowries, hoping their riches would once again be worth something. A day that would never come.

As well as all the cowries imported into West Africa as tainted symbols of oppression, the region has plenty of shells of its own. Most of them aren’t used for money, though, but for food.

CHAPTER FOUR

Shell Food

N
ot far from the westernmost point of the African continent, on a cool cloudy afternoon, I stood gazing up at the bare branches of a baobab tree. Its crown, 10 metres above me, looked out over the mangrove forests and the salty, winding creeks of Senegal’s Sine-Saloum Delta that flow into the Atlantic Ocean. As all baobabs do, this tree had a gargantuan trunk with folded, blubbery skin. The spongy insides hold a water reservoir that sees it through dry times. Shortly before the rains return each year, the baobab draws on this pool of water and bursts into blooms of dangling white flowers that stink of rotting meat, attracting bat pollinators. Over this tree’s long life – at least a few hundred years – it has seen many rains and many bats come and go. And down beneath its roots, this giant, ancient tree has been growing for all these years on a vast pile of seashells. Over centuries, millions of
empty shells have been bound together in the soil. I was standing on an island made of shells.

More than 200 shell middens have been found across the delta. The oldest dates back more than 10,000 years, with the largest standing 11 metres (more than 35 feet) high and spreading across an area of 10 hectares (25 acres). Several are burial tumuli, the final resting place for rulers from the kingdoms of Sine and Saloum, which share a distant, entwined history. Other shell mounds contain no human remains but are just the accumulated debris from millions of molluscs that have been eaten by people.

Cockles and oysters have long been a staple food for people living in the Sine-Saloum Delta and they have been the basis for an export trade since the sixteenth century. Mandinka merchants harvested seashells and sold the sun-dried meat far and wide. The piles of shells they left behind are testament to the immensely rich waters that have produced so much food over the millennia.

On one side of the shell island I crunched along a beach made entirely of cream and grey cockleshells. These are West African Bloody Cockles. Their name comes from the bright red haemoglobin pigment they produce (rather than transporting oxygen around the body, as it does in vertebrates, haemoglobin in bloody cockles could have a role in disease resistance). Beyond the beach, a mangrove forest began. The boatman who brought me to the little island steered the narrow wooden pirogue into a green tunnel of these salt-loving trees. I clambered onto the tough mangrove roots to get a crab’s-eye view of the world. When the boat engine cut to silence I could hear snapping and popping all around me. It was the sound of oysters, shutting their shells as the tide fell. Known as Mangrove Oysters, they live permanently stuck to these shadowy roots, and twice a day, while exposed to the air, they stay firmly closed, holding a miniature salty ocean inside their shells. The oysters’ dry spells are far shorter and more frequent than the baobab’s prolonged, yearly
droughts. Listening to all the clops and crackles, I realised I was surrounded by a vast and noisy seafood feast.